Communication between doctors and deaf patients: when health is at stake

Communication between doctor and patient is essential to ensure good medical care and ensure that the patient is well informed and empowered to improve their health. Health organizations have been training professionals in communication skills for some time now, but there are some sectors of the population for whom this communication is a major challenge, for example, people with hearing loss or limited knowledge of the local language. Poor communication can have serious consequences, ranging from mistakes when taking medication to cases where patients have died.

Researcher Amy Dara Hochberg, from the Interuniversity Research Group in Linguistic Applications (GRIAL) at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), is working on a project to make medical information understandable to deaf people and foreign patients who do not speak the local language. Hochberg, who suffers from profound hearing loss, has been awarded an ONCE-Investiga grant for her project on textual accessibility in multilingual healthcare communication, with real-time transcription and plain language strategies for inclusive communication.

The aim of the research is to develop guides for healthcare professionals and a practical framework for textual accessibility to help patients with oral comprehension difficulties better understand healthcare matters.

The anguish of misunderstanding a diagnosis

The method most often used by deaf people to facilitate communication in healthcare is automatic voice-to-text transcription systems. These often produce errors or generate texts that are too long, making reading difficult, especially for patients with a limited level of health literacy. "Such systems can miss negation (no's and not's) or interpret them incorrectly. This can cause unnecessary anxiety or serious misunderstandings," said the researcher, who has personally experienced the serious implications of not understanding a medical diagnosis: "I had a scare because of a possible cancer. The doctor said 'the test does not indicate cancer' and the transcript read 'the test indicates cancer'. Fortunately, the growth was benign, but I had to insist that the doctor let me read the results from the pathology laboratory. I have a medical background, but many patients don't."

Her case is one of many in the field of healthcare communication involving people with hearing loss, where critical misunderstandings can occur: erroneous transcriptions might say "it is necessary to operate", when the doctor says "it is not necessary to operate"; or confusing "amoxilin" and "amoxicillin", or "atrial vibration" and "atrial fibrillation".

The results of the researcher's work will be published in guides for health professionals and technical teams. They will be available as open access in Spanish, Catalan and English. They will first be tested by deaf subjects, people with hearing loss and non-native speakers. The main goal is to reduce the risk of illness and death in these groups.

Barriers beyond healthcare

In her career, Hochberg, a translator by training, has had to overcome a range of obstacles, from difficulties finding a job to receiving a lower salary than colleagues in the same position due to her hearing loss. Despite her excellent academic results, she has experienced significant difficulties in finding professional opportunities, she said, especially in the United States, her country of origin.

"Accessibility measures that would allow an organization to take full advantage of a deaf person's abilities are often perceived as an unnecessary expense, rather than a smart investment." "My motto," she said, "is 'How can I help?'. I realized that this project would benefit different sectors of the population, beyond the deaf community of which I am a part. That was the decisive factor in taking it on."

Improving communication in sensitive environments

GRIAL is part of UOC-TRÀNSIC (the Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Social and Cultural Transformations) and Hochberg's research is aligned with its mission to use applied linguistics to improve communication in sensitive environments and for people from vulnerable groups. Albert Morales, a researcher in the group and a member of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, said that the ONCE grant – one of only four postdoctoral fellowships awarded in Spain – recognizes "the commitment of the group and the UOC to research that is transformative and that has a real social application. Science is only excellent if it is fully inclusive and diverse."

Hochberg's research will be fundamental in transforming certain features of specialized health communication and complex medical terminology, and making them more accessible. "This not only guarantees the right to information of vulnerable groups, such as deaf people or foreigners, but also helps develop real safe autonomy in an environment as critical as healthcare," said Morales. The use of real-time transcription and the application of plain language strategies is a priority area for GRIAL, which has organized and taken part in projects to simplify administrative procedures, improve accessibility to social media and analyse the use of sign language in healthcare communication.

"This funding is a great springboard for transferring academic research directly to society. It supports our aim of making the university a benchmark in the use of artificial intelligence, applied linguistics and the processing of natural language for social purposes," said Morales.

This research is aligned with the UOC's strategic missions for Planetary health and well-being and Ethical and human-centred technology, and contributes to the following Sustainable Development Goals: SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-being) and SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities).

Reference project:

Accesibilidad textual en la comunicación sanitaria multilingüe: transcripción en tiempo real y estrategias de lenguaje claro para una comunicación inclusiva (Textual accessibility in multilingual healthcare communication: real-time transcription and plain language strategies for inclusive communication). Funded by the ONCE Foundation (ONCE-Investiga) with €30,000. Duration: February 2026 - February 2027. 

Transformative, impactful research

At the UOC, we see research as a strategic tool to advance towards a future society that is more critical, responsible and nonconformist. With this vision, we conduct applied research that's interdisciplinary and linked to the most important social, technological and educational challenges.

The UOC’s over 500 researchers and more than 50 research groups are working in five research units focusing on five missions: lifelong learning; ethical and human-centred technology; digital transition and sustainability; culture for a critical society, and digital health and planetary well-being.

The university's Hubbik platform fosters knowledge transfer and entrepreneurship in the UOC community.

More information: www.uoc.edu/en/research